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Title: Black Man's Grave: Letters From Sierra Leone
ISBN: 0979080827
Author:
Stewart
Publicate Date: 2007-02-28
Publish: 2007-02-28
List Price: $14.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.94
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $6.45
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.96
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Eyewitness reportage from an unusual perspective
The authors are well qualified to write on the subject of Sierra Leone, having lived in a village there as Peace Corps volunteers. They report on what the "fly-in-photograph-an-amputee-fly-out" press corps has called a "civil war," but what Sierra Leoneans more accurately call the Rebellion. Their primary sources are letters from friends, people who lived through the violence and who stayed in contact throughout the whole terrible time. The people writing the letters create a vivid picture of the physical and economic devastation they endured, and the authors place these pictures in a larger context that includes what was going on in Liberia at the time. I commend them for resisting the urge to editorialize, and for letting the facts speak for themselves.
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2: Voices that should be heard
I finished reading Black Man's Grave recently and found it very interesting; I read it in two days, and I am notorious for prolonging or abandoning books that I don't like, to give you some idea of context here. It was a story I really had very little idea of. When civil war afflicts a country like Sierra Leone, it only tends to get into the American media every few years when there is major combat in a major city. I had never seen the issues and the personalities laid out with such clarity, let alone guessed the impact on people trying to lead ordinary lives (economic, social, family) in the community. I would imagine, not unruefully, that the reason the book did not find a major publisher is that it's in the voices of the authors' friends in Fadugu, Sierra Leone. Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You, which is also a very good book, has an edge in terms of marketability in that it is a "voice-driven" book by a Western reporter. Gourevitch relays what others tell him, just as Stewart & Amman do (he was not an eyewitness to the Rwandan genocide), but he does it as a first-person character; it's part travel book, odd as that seems. By giving people from Sierra Leone such a major voice in Black Man's Grave, having them truly speak for themselves, Stewart & Amman probably lost a potential American audience - or to be accurate, went beyond publishers' willingness to find out whether such an audience exists. I think that publishers sell their public short sometimes.
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